The Captain of the Janizaries Part 34

The Turks placed his ghastly head between the feet of the bronze horse, a part of the equestrian statue of Justinian, where it was reverently saluted even by the Moslems, who paused in the rage of the sack to think upon the virtue and courage of the unfortunate monarch.

Captain Ballaban had pressed rapidly through the city to the doors of St. Sophia. The oaken gates flew back under the axes of the Moslems.

Monks and matrons, children and nuns, lords and beggars were crowded together, not knowing whether the grand dome would melt away and a legion of angels descend for their relief, or the vast enclosure would become a pen of indiscriminate slaughter. The motley and helpless misery excited the pity of the captors. Ballaban's voice rang through the arches, proclaiming safely to those who should submit. That he might the better command the scene, he made his way to the chancel in front of the grand altar. It was filled with the nuns, repeating their prayers. Among them was the fair Albanian. Her face was but partly toward him, yet he could never mistake that queenly head. She was addressing the Sisters. Holding aloft the bright shaft of a stiletto, she cried,--

"Let us give ourselves to heaven, but never to the harem!"

Ballaban paused an instant. But that instant seemed to him many minutes. As, under the lightning's flash, the whole moving panorama of the wide landscape seems to stand still, and paints vividly its prominent objects, however scattered, upon the startled eye of the beholders; so his mind marvellously quickened by the excitement, took in at once the long track of his own life. He saw a little child's hand wreathing him with flowers plucked beside a cottage on the Balkans; a lovely captive whose face was lit by the blazing home in a hamlet of Albania; a form of one at Sfetigrade lying still and faint with sickness, but radiant as with the beginning of transfiguration for the spirit life; and the queenly being who was borne in the palanquin through the gate of Phranza. But how changed! How much more glorious now! Earthly beauty had become haloed with the heavenly. He never had conceived of such majesty, such glory of personality, such splendor of character, as were revealed by her att.i.tude, her eye, her voice, her purpose.

"But now," thought he, "the descending blade will change this utmost sublimity of being into a little heap of gory dust!"

All this flashed through his mind. In another instant his strong hand had caught the arm of the voluntary sacrifice. The stiletto, falling, caught in the folds of her garments, and then rang upon the marble floor of the chancel. Morsinia uttered a shriek and fell, apparently as lifeless as if the blade had entered her heart.

The Janizary stood astounded. A tide of feeling strange to him poured through his soul. For the first time in his life he felt a horror of war. Not thousands writhing on the battle field could blanch his cheek with pity for their pangs: but that one voice rang through and through him, and rent his heart with sympathetic agony. Her cry had become a cry of his own soul too.

For the first time he realized the dignity of woman's character. This woman was not even wounded. She had fallen beneath the stroke of a thought, a sentiment, a woman's notion of her honor! The women he had known had no such fatal scruples. Other captive beauties soon became accustomed to their new surroundings. Many even offered to buy with their charms an exchange of poverty for the luxuries of the harem of Pashas and wealthy Moslems. Was this a solitary woman's tragedy of virtue? Or was it some peculiar teaching of the Christian's faith that inspired her to such heroism? However it came, the man knew that with her it was a mighty reality; this instinct of virtue; this sanct.i.ty of person.

And this woman was his dream made real! A celestial ideal which he had touched!

The man's brain reeled with the shock of these tenderer and deeper feelings, coming after the wildness of the battle rage. He grasped the altar for support. The blood seemed to have ceased to bound in his veins, the temples to be pulseless; a band to have been drawn tightly about his brain so as to paralyze its action. He felt himself falling.

A deathly sickness spread through his frame. He was sure he had fainted. He thought he must have been unconscious for a while. Yet when he opened his eyes, the soldier near him was in the same att.i.tude of dragging a nun by her wrists as when he last saw him. Time had stood still with his pulses. He shuddered at the cruelty on every side, as the shrieks from the high galleries were answered by those in distant alcoves and from the deep crypt. He watched the groups of old men and children, monks and senators, nuns and courtesans, tied together and dragged away, some for slaughter, some for princely ransom, some for shame.

The building was well emptied when the Sultan entered.

He at once advanced to the altar and proclaimed:

"G.o.d is G.o.d; there is but one G.o.d, and Mahomet is the apostle of G.o.d!"

"But whom have we here, Captain Ballaban?"

"Your Majesty, I am guarding a beautiful captive whom I would not have fall into the hands of the common soldiers; I take it, of high estate," replied the Janizary, knowing that such an introduction to the royal attention alone could save her from the fate which awaited the unhappy maidens, most of whom were liable to be sold to brutal masters and transported to distant provinces.

The Sultan gazed upon the partly conscious woman, and commanded,----

"Let her be veiled! Seek out a goodly house. Find the Eunuch Tamlich."

Ballaban shuddered at this command, and was about to reply, when his judgment suggested that he was impotent to dispute the royal will except by endangering the life or the welfare of his captive.

The safest place for her was, after all, with the maidens who were known to be the choice of the Sultan, and thus beyond insult by any except the imperial debauchee.

Mahomet II. gave orders for the immediate transformation of the Christian temple of St. Sophia into a Mosque. In a few hours desolation reigned in those "Courts of the Lord's House," which, when first completed, ages ago, drew from the imperial founder, the remark: "Oh, Solomon! I have surpa.s.sed thee!" and which, though the poverty of later monarchs had allowed it to become sadly impaired, was yet regarded by the Greek Christians as worthy of being the vestibule of heaven.

The command of the Sultan: "Take away every trace of the idolatry of the infidel!" was obeyed in demolishing the rarest gems of Christian art to which attached the least symbolism of the now abolished worship. The arms were chiseled off the marble crosses which stood out in relief from the side walls, and from the bases of the gigantic pillars. The rare mosaics which lined the church as if it were a vast casket--the fitting gift of the princes of the earth to the King of Kings--were plastered or painted over. The altar, that marvellous combination of gold and silver and bronze, conglomerate with a thousand precious stones, was torn away, that the red slab of the Mihrab might point the prayers of the new devotees toward Mecca. The furniture, from that upon the grand altar to the banners and mementoes of a thousand years, the donations of Greek emperors and sovereigns of other lands, was broken or torn into pieces. There remained only the grand proportions of the building--its chief glory--enriched by polished surfaces of marble and porphyry slabs; the superb pillars brought by the reverent cupidity of earlier ages from the ruined temple of Diana at Ephesus, the temple of the Sun at Palmyra, the temple on the Acro-Corinthus, and the mythologic urn from Pergamus, which latter, having been used as a baptismal font by the followers of Jesus, was now devoted to the ablutions of the Moslems.

From St. Sophia the Sultan pa.s.sed to the palace of the Greek Caesars.

"Truly! truly!" said he "The spider's web is the royal curtain; the owl sounds the watch cry on the towers of Afrasiab," quoting from the Persian poet Firdusi, as he gazed about the deserted halls. He issued his mandate which should summon architects and decorators, not only from his dominions, but from Christian nations, to adorn the splendid headland with the palatial motley of walls and kiosks which were to const.i.tute his new seraglio.

The considerateness of Ballaban led him to select the house of Phranza as the place to which Morsinia was taken. The n.o.ble site and substantial structure of the mansion of the late chamberlain commended it to the Sultan for the temporary haremlik; and the familiar rooms alleviated, like the faces of mute friends, the wildness of the grief of their only familiar captive.

CHAPTER XLII.

Constantine, after his escape from the Sultan's tent, where he had been taken for the demented Ballaban, was unable to enter Constantinople before it fell. His heart was torn with agonizing solicitude for the fate of Morsinia. He knew too well the determination of the dauntless girl in the event of her falling into the hands of the Turks. Filling his dreams at night, and rising before him as a terrible apparition by day, was that loved form, a suicide empurpled with its own gore. Yet love and duty led him to seek her, or at least to seek the certainty of her fate. He therefore disguised himself as a Moslem and mingled with the throng of soldiers and adventurers who entered the city under its new possessors. He wandered for hours about the familiar streets, that, perchance, he might come upon some memorial of her. The secrets of the royal harem he could not explore, even if suspicion led his thought thither. The proximity of the residence of Phranza was guarded by the immediate servants of the Sultan, so that he was deprived of even the fond misery of visiting the scenes so a.s.sociated with his former joy.

In pa.s.sing through one of the narrowest and foulest streets--the only ones that had been left undisturbed by the Vandalism of the conquerors--he came upon an old woman, hideous in face and decrepit, whom he remembered as a beggar at the gate of Phranza. From her he learned many stories of the last hours of the siege.

According to her story she had gone among the first to St. Sophia.

When the Moslems entered they tied her by a silken girdle to the person of the Grand Chamberlain, and, amid the jeers of the soldiers, marched them together to the Hippodrome. She remembered the Sultan as he rode on his horse,--how he struck with his battle hammer one of the silver heads of the bronze serpents, and cried: "So I smite the heads of the kingdoms!" Just as he did so he turned, and saw her in her rags tied to the courtly-robed lord, and in an angry voice commanded that the princely man be loosed from contact with the filthy hag. Phranza was taken away: but n.o.body cared to take her away. She was trampled by the crowd, but lived. And n.o.body thought of turning her out of her hovel home. She was as safe as is a rat when the robbers have killed the n.o.bler inmates of a house.

The woman said that she had heard that the daughter of Phranza was sent away somewhere to an island home. But the Albanian Princess,--Yes, she knew her well; for no hand used to drop so bountifully the alms she asked, or said so kindly "Jesu pity you, my good woman!" as did that beautiful lady. The beggar declared that she stood near her by the altar in St. Sophia. "She looked so saintly there! There was a real aureole about her head as she prayed, so she was a saint indeed. Then she raised her dagger!" But the wretched watcher could watch no longer, though she heard her cry, so wild that she would never cease to hear it.

The beggar ceased her story; all her words had cut through her listener's heart as if they had been daggers.

"It is well!" he said, "I will go to Albania. Among those who loved her I will worship her memory; and, under Castriot, I will seek my revenge."

CHAPTER XLIII.

Morsinia's fears, and her horror at the antic.i.p.ated life in the harem, were not confirmed by its actual scenes. Except for the constant surveillance of the Nubian eunuchs and female attendants, there was no restriction upon her liberty. She pa.s.sed through the familiar corridors, and rested upon the divan in what had been her own chamber in better days. Other female captives became her companions; but among them were none of those belonging to Constantinople. Suburban villages were represented; but most of the odalisks[84] were Circa.s.sian beauties, whose conduct did not indicate that they felt any shame in their condition. They indulged in jealous rivalry, estimating their own worth by the sums which the agents of the Sultan had paid their parents for their possession; or bantering one another as to who of their number would first meet the fancy of their royal master.

There were several Greeks, who, with more modesty of speech, spared none of the arts of the toilet to prepare themselves to better their condition in the only way that was now open to them. A Coptic girl had been sent by Eenal, the Borghite Khalif of Egypt, as a present to the Sultan. Her form was slight, and without the fullness of development which other races a.s.sociate with female beauty, but of wonderful grace of pose and motion; her face was broad; eyes wide and expressionless; mouth straight. Yet her features had that symmetry and balance which gave to them a strange fascination. The Turcoman Emir who had already given his daughter to Mahomet--the nuptials with whom he was celebrating when called to the throne--exercised still further his fatherly office in presenting to his son-in-law as fine a pair of black eyes as ever flashed their cruel commands to an amative heart.

To study this physiognomical museum afforded Morsinia an entertaining relief from the otherwise constant torture of her thoughts.

To her further diversion one was introduced into the harem who spoke her own Albanian tongue. This new comer was of undoubted beauty, so far as that quality could be the product of merely physical elements.

It was of the kind that might bind a G.o.d on earth, but could never help a soul to heaven. Her lower face, with full red lips arching the pearliest teeth, and complexion ruddy with the glow of health, shading into the snowy bosom, might perhaps serve to make a Venus; but her upper features, the low forehead and dilated nostrils, could never have been made to bespeak the thoughtful Minerva in this retreat of those, who, to the Moslem imagination, are the types of heavenly perfection. Her eyes were bright, but only with surface l.u.s.tre. Her nature evidently contained no depths which could hold either n.o.ble resentment or self sacrificing love; either grand earthly pa.s.sion or heavenly faith.

This woman's vanity did not long keep back the story of her life. She told of her conquest of the village swains who fought for the possession of her charms; of the devotion of an Albanian prince who took her dowerless in preference to the ladies of great family and fortune, and would have bestowed upon her the heirship to his estates: of how she was stolen away from the great castle by a company of Turkish officers, who afterward fought among themselves for the privilege of presenting her to the Valide Sultana;[85] for it was about the time of the Ramedan feast when the Sultan's mother made an annual gift to her son of the most beautiful woman she could secure.

The vain captive declared that the jealousy of the odalisks at Adrianople had led the Kislar Aga to send her here to Constantinople.

"And who was the Albanian n.o.bleman whose bride you had become?" asked Morsinia.

"Oh, one who is to be king of Albania one day, the Voivode Amesa."

"Ah!" said Morsinia, "this is news from my country. When was it determined that Amesa should be king?"

"Oh! every one speaks of it at the castle as if it were well understood. And when he becomes king then he will claim me again from Mahomet, though he must ransom me with half his kingdom. Yes, I am to be a queen; and indeed I may be one already, for perhaps Lord Amesa is now on the throne. And that is the reason I wear the cord of gold in my hair; for one day my royal lover will put the crown here."

The bedizened beauty rose and paced to and fro through the great salon. The pride which gave the majestic toss to her head, however it would have marred that ethereal form which the inner eye of the moralist or the Christian always sees, and which is called character, only gave an additional charm to her;--as the delicate yet stately comb of the peac.o.c.k adds to the fascination of that bird. Her carriage combined the gracefulness of perfect anatomy and health with the dignity which conceit, thoroughly diffused in muscle and nerve, lent to all her movements. With that step upon it no carpet beneath a throne would have been dishonored. Her dress was in exquisite keeping with her person. The close fitting zone or girdle about her waist left the bust uncontorted; a model which needed no device to supplement the perfection of nature. A robe of purple velvet trailed luxuriantly behind; but in front was looped so as to display the loose trousers of white silk which were gathered below the knee and fell in full ruffles about the unstockinged ankles, but not so low as to conceal the rings of silver which clasped them, and the slippers of yellow satin, ending in long and curved points, which protruded from beneath.

As the other women gazed at this self-a.s.sumed queen of the harem the green fire of jealousy flashed alike from black eyes and blue. The straight thin noses of the Greeks for the moment forgot their cla.s.sic models, and dilated as if in rivalry of that flattened feature of the Egyptian; while the straight mouth of the daughter of the Nile writhed in indescribable curves, indicative of commingled wrath, hatred, pique and scorn.

This parade would have produced in Morsinia the feeling of contempt, were it not for that sisterly interest which was awakened by the fact that she was her own country-woman. Morsinia's face, usually calm in its great dignity and reserve, now flushed with the struggle between indignation and pity for the girl.

At this moment the purple hangings which separated the salon from the open court were held aside by the silver staff of the eunuch in charge; and the young Padishah stood as a spectator of the scene.